Hey there, welcome to JHYPE.

As you’ve hopefully figured out from the little blurb beneath our funky logo (katakana, is there anything it can’t do?), JHYPE is all about sharing our love for Japan. Sure, it might border on obsessive from time to time – even fanatical – but that’s what having a passion is all about.

JHYPE is very much in the ‘incubation’ stages. We’re figuring out exactly what we want from this blog; what we want to share, what we think you might like to see, how it should be presented and how often we should offer it (it’s not a day job, so time is a factor).

None of the JHYPE team are experts on Japanese culture or the things that go with it, but we all love more than a few elements of what it has to offer, and those are the things we’ll be sharing here. And hey, as we go along, we’ll probably learn a lot more and end up sharing those things too. Right on.

We hope you like the style of JHYPE, as well. We’re using a simple Wordpress theme – one of the many provided with the software – and we’ve obviously tweaked it a little to suit our needs. We dig the stark layout; it’s very light on graphics, which to us means that the site can a) load a lot faster, and b) focus more on the images we’ll post with our entries.

JHYPE is, first and foremost, a labour of love. We’re not paid to do this, and we’re not expecting to ever make much money off it – if any at all. So our first aim is to please ourselves, and hopefully the things we post please you as much as it does us.

If you’ve got any thoughts on what should be on JHYPE, please share ‘em in the comments. And if you’re interested in being a part of this not-remotely-unique experiment, make contact with us. You don’t need to be a professional writer, just so long as you’ve got a good grasp of the English language and its intricacies.

Thanks!

Van |

About JHYPE’s Contributors

Van is a graphic designer living and working in Melbourne, Australia. His earliest memory of Japanese culture, like most Westerners, is probably Astro Boy.

A more recent memory, though nearly as far back, is a decidedly Westernised version of Japanese culture: Robotech. In the dark ol’ 80s, Robotech was shown on morning television here in Australia, before school hours.

It continues to be one of Van’s favourite all-time anime series’, despite his subsequent discovery of Macross and the ties that bind the two franchises (along with the other series that tied in to the whole sordid mess).

In the years since, Van’s love of Japan has grown to include the beautiful and historic architecture, the forests and sakura trees, the cars (oh, how he loves the cars), and plenty more.

Andy designs meaningful products in Sydney, Australia. He loves and adores (i.e. worship) all things Japanese, having grown up surrounded by Japanese anime, manga, design, food, toys and automobiles.

He hunts high and low for the best (and worst) that Japan has to offer, spamming his friends on Facebook and Twitter with his findings. He has enough sources and materials to turn the hardest criminal into a polite, savvy Japanese culture and vending-machine-loving cosplayer.

When Andy isn’t surfing the web for Japanese hypes and trends, he surfs (badly) the waves in Maroubra and snorkels in Clovelly. Andy also loves to travel (locally and abroad) and take photographs.

His one mission in life is to enrich his soul one day at a time, and with JHYPE, hopefully it will enrich yours too.